This blog is shorter (as in spending little time on) still. This brain concussion has limited my screen time. So I resolved to reading commentaries! What a new concept. But in order to translate what I read to the blog screen I had to dictate into my iPhone which did the voice to text translation - with plenty of mistakes of course!
Today's scripture passage is a familiar one which I never managed to quite understand. It's taken from Luke 17:20-37: The Coming of the Kingdom of God
"Once, on being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, Jesus replied, “The coming of the kingdom of God is not something that can be observed, nor will people say, ‘Here it is,’ or ‘There it is,’ because the kingdom of God is in your midst.”
Then he said to his disciples, “The time is coming when you will long to see one of the days of the Son of Man, but you will not see it. People will tell you, ‘There he is!’ or ‘Here he is!’ Do not go running off after them. For the Son of Man in his day will be like the lightning, which flashes and lights up the sky from one end to the other. But first he must suffer many things and be rejected by this generation.
“Just as it was in the days of Noah, so also will it be in the days of the Son of Man. People were eating, drinking, marrying and being given in marriage up to the day Noah entered the ark. Then the flood came and destroyed them all.
“It was the same in the days of Lot. People were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building. But the day Lot left Sodom, fire and sulfur rained down from heaven and destroyed them all.
“It will be just like this on the day the Son of Man is revealed. On that day no one who is on the housetop, with possessions inside, should go down to get them. Likewise, no one in the field should go back for anything. Remember Lot’s wife! Whoever tries to keep their life will lose it, and whoever loses their life will preserve it. I tell you, on that night two people will be in one bed; one will be taken and the other left. Two women will be grinding grain together; one will be taken and the other left.”
“Where, Lord?” they asked. He replied, “Where there is a dead body, there the vultures will gather.”"
My wife and I used to read a lot of books from NT Wright - a very well respected New Testament Scholar. In fact we heard him speak at the Mere Anglicanism conference a few years back. We had purchased a set of commentaries by him, and I confess, which has been sitting on our bookshelf untouched! So I decided to read what he has to say about this passage. What I quoted below (dictated and converted with my iPhone!) gave me lots of new insight:
"What does the word apocalypse conjure up to you? Hollywood fantasies? Stars falling from the sky, volcanoes and earthquakes? People in terror, panicking and rushing this way and that?
The Bible has plenty of apocalypses, and sometimes they sound like that. This passage is one of them: Noah’s flood sweeping everybody away, and fire and sulphur raining on Sodom as Lot and his family escaped. That’s exactly the sort of thing many people think of when they hear the word apocalypse.
But did Jesus think it would be like that? What does this passage mean?
There has been a growth industry in writing books based on passages like this. One will be taken, and the other left; some have assumed that being taken in this sense means being snatched up to heaven to be with God, leaving the others behind to survive in a frightening world from which all the true believers have been removed. That’s not what the passage means, though; it’s actually the other way round. The people who are taken are the ones in danger; they are being taken away by hostile forces, taken away to their doom.
But what are these hostile forces? What are the eagles that will gather around the body, and what will they do? And what has all these got to do with the days of the son of man witch the disciples will long for but won’t see?
The rest of Luke’s gospel makes it clear how he thought we should understand it. The passage does not refer to an event in which natural or supernatural forces will devastate our town, a region, or the known world; rather, like so many of Jesus warnings in Luke, it refers to the time when enemy armies will invade and wreak sudden destruction. The word that means vultures is the same word as eagles (ancient writers thought vultures were a kind of eagle), and there may be a cryptic reference here to the Roman legions, with the eagle as their imperial badge.
This makes sense of the warnings. When the legions arrive, the best thing to do is to get out and run; don’t even think about collecting belongings. Normal life will be going on one moment, the next there will be a panic, and the wisest advice is not to think about the necessities of life itself until you’re well out-of-the-way. People who are found either asleep or working indoors at the mill, and thus taken unawares, will find that the invaders will snatch one here and one there. And there won’t be any doubt that it’s happening. It won’t be a spiritual event that would need special discernment. It will be like lightning, suddenly lighting up a dark sky.
What has this got to do then with 'the son of man'? The days of the Son of Man seems to refer to the days when as in the prophecy of Daniel (chapter 7) the one like a son of man will be vindicated by God after suffering. The sign of this will be the destruction of the oppressor, the power that has opposed God’s people and God‘s purpose. In Daniel, this power is the fourth beast, the greatest of the pagan armies. For Jesus, in one of the most dramatic twists of thinking, the force that has most directly opposed his teaching and his kingdom ministry is official Israel itself, focus on the temple and it’s hierarchy, and the Pharisees whose thinking and practice derived from the temple.
We have seen again and again in Luke that Jesus warns of awful destruction coming upon his contemporaries for their failure to heed his message. Now he uses the apocalyptic language of some Jewish prophecy to ram the same warnings home. The days of 'the son of man' are the days in which this figure representing God’s true people, is finally vindicated after his suffering. And that vindication will take the form of the destruction of the city, and the temple, that have set their face against his gospel of peace.
Why then does Jesus say, at the start of his message, that God‘s kingdom isn’t the sort of thing for which there are advance signs?
The question from the Pharisees implied that Jesus has a timetable in mind, in which certain things would happen in a particular order so that one could tick them off and get ready for the final drama. Part of Jesus answer as we have seen is that it won’t be like that. Life will go on as normal until the last moment; but there is something else to be said as well. God‘s kingdom he says, is within your grasp.
The phrase he uses is in verse 21 is sometimes translated within you, and people have often thought it meant that the kingdom is purely spiritual, a private, interior relationship with God. But Jesus never uses God‘s kingdom in that sense. It always refers to something that happened in the public world, not to private experience. Others have suggested that the phrase means in your midst; God’s kingdom, in other words, is present but secret, hidden, waiting for them to discover it. That is closer, but still not quite there. The phrase is more active. It doesn’t just tell you where the kingdom is; it tells you that you’ve got to do something about it. It is within your grasp; it is confronting you with a decision, the decision to believe, trust and follow Jesus. It isn’t the sort of things that’s just going to happen, so that you can sit back and watch. God’s sovereign plan to put the world to rights is waiting for you to sign on. That is the force of what Jesus is saying.
The warnings of Jesus came through in A.D. 70. But the promise of the kingdom remains. It may well be that, at the still-future time when God finally overcomes sin and death for good and remakes the heavens and the earth, there will once more be a moment when, in the midst of normal life, ruin breaks in on those who have not heeded God’s call. But that isn’t what this passage is about. The passage holds out an invitation, to this day, to those who are anxious about the future: God’s sovereign rule of the world, his healing love, are not only yours for the grasping, but are waiting for your help."
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